Deciphering The Asia Series: Dylan, Duchamp and the Letter from Woody

All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. - Marcel Duchamp

When considering what Bob Dylan might have had in mind with his new collection of paintings The Asia Series, which has raised a bit of a hubbub, a good place to start is the interview with John Elderfield that is in the catalog for the series.

Dylan has been using the interview form to incorporate hidden messages and subtext. For instance, in the 2009 interview with Bill Flanagan to promote the album Together Through Life, which appears to have been conducted via email, Dylan included a series of hidden references to the poems of Juvenal. I covered this in a pair of posts at the time. Sean Wilentz makes reference to my posts in his book Bob Dylan in America when he writes, "By 2009, Dylan, knowingly or not, was mixing other allusions with his carnival reveries—Atlas the Dwarf and Miss Europe probably come out of Juvenal's Satires—but then again, the late Roman Empire was a circus, too."   

That Wilentz writes "knowingly or not" is a cop-out, a big one. I have provided hundreds of examples of Dylan using material from other sources in his work, from his songs to his memoir to his interviews, often with clear winks or nods. It is part of his method, an aspect of his art that has not been fully explored or appreciated.

In my previous post I demonstrated how Dylan's description of artist Red Grooms in Chronicles: Volume One is, in part, a collage constructed out of passages from articles on Grooms that appeared in TIME and New York Magazine. I showed how Dylan seems to have included a hidden reference to muralist José Clemente Orozco in that discussion of Grooms. I mentioned that Dylan uses similar methods to incorporate hidden references to other visual artists, particularly Kandinsky and Rouault.

Because of that this series of exchanges in the Elderfield interview caught my eye:

You are reported as having said in the late 1970s, "I've learned as much from Cézanne as I have from Woody Guthrie." Before getting to Cézanne, are you interested in Guthrie's paintings as well as his songs? And did you talk to him about them when you visited him?
Woody made simple sketches for small publications, and he was a sign painter before becoming a musician. But I never did talk to him about it.

Staying with American art for a while, you have spoken of your interest in the paintings of George Bellows and Thomas Hart Benton. I can see how makers of narrative figure compositions would attract you, but why them in particular—if, indeed, they are particular favorites?
Benton is the Uncle Dave Macon of painting. Most of his pictures have a knee-slapping, banjo-riffing, farmyard quality. And it looks to me like he knew something about the camera obscura, though to what degree it's hard to say. Whether he painted his models upside down, I don't know, but that style has always fascinated me. As for Bellows, I just like his themes and his color combinations.

Among more recent Americans, you have spoken about Red Grooms. When did you become interested in his work?
I think I talked about Red Grooms in my book. I saw a few of his exhibitions back in the '60s and have always marveled at his ability to create excitement out of mundanity. Fantastic dreams, mass wealth on a little scale, preposterous and satirical, but very imposing.

That Dylan calls Thomas Hart Benton the "Uncle Dave Macon of painting" is peculiar, in that Dylan calls Red Grooms the "the Uncle Dave Macon of the art world" in Chronicles: Volume One. Dylan is drawing attention to this for a reason. He is continuing his discussion of Woody Guthrie from the previous question in the interview, but in a way that needs to be deciphered.

I've written about and demonstrated Dylan's use of the letters of Jack London, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe. Dylan also uses material from the letters of Woody Guthrie and he is acknowledging this here. In a colorful 1941 letter to Millard Lampell of the Almanac Singers Guthrie refers to Pete Seeger as "the Uncle Dave Macon of the labor movement." Here's part of the letter:    

Dear Mill, Howdy Boy,

How's the writers cramps? Making lots of money? It looks like the more money you make the worse it cramps your writing. Same way with singing or anything else. But the way you old boys are set up there in your old loft I imagine there aint no way in the world you could let money cramp you. The more dough you go to making the more you get to run around with the white collars. I hope you don't ever let their ideas soak in on you. It was such a good stew that you old boys made and the best time was had right there too. Your songs and the stuff you wrote were worth a lot to either side and will attract attention for you from both sides. The other side sucks you dry and dont give you nothing. Our side gives you the real stuff you need and whole train loads of good fresh material, but not much money. We aint on the money side and dont fight with money, but we use the Truth and its like a spring of cold water. Hows the Ciscoes and have you seen them lately? I wrote to them and their address has been changed. You big horse you must have been awful busy a getting rich. You aint wrote me a drop. Old Pete's still a throwing his head way back like a coyote and a frailing that old banjo. Petes really been around. He's the Uncle Dave Macon of the labor movement.

That the original context of the Uncle Dave Macon comment in Guthrie's letter has to do with the labor movement adds another dimension to Dylan's comments regarding Benton, bringing to mind a number of Benton's works on the subject. It is put to better use here than it was in Chronicles: Volume One, where it was applied to Red Grooms.

When Dylan comments on Grooms in this new interview he may be using some of the same techniques that he uses in that section of Chronicles: Volume One that he just called attention to. First, notice that Dylan makes a passing reference to camera obscura. Dylan probably used a similar method for the paintings in The Asia Series. He also may be making a reference to another artist who often took a confrontational approach in his art. When discussing Red Grooms he uses the odd phrase "preposterous and satirical." I suggest that those three words are a key, just as "Uncle Dave Macon" serves as a key. In Chronicles: Volume One Dylan hid that reference to Orozco while discussing Grooms. This time he could be discussing the work of Marcel Duchamp through the same method.

From the 1945 essay "Marcel Duchamp: Anti-Artist" by Harriet Janis and Sidney Janis:

The Coffee-grinder is Duchamp's earliest proto-dada work, his first gesture of turning against the practises as well as the symbols of the traditional artist. Here for the first time, he dissects the machine, and in exploring its parts, makes a new machine, showing in the process sardonic amusement with, and irreverence for, the power of the machine and the modern sanctities of efficiency and utility. Something of this general attitude is present in Rube Goldberg's humorous play on mechanization, where a complex and fantastic display of ingenuity is employed to obtain a disarmingly simple result; in Ed Wynn's delightfully preposterous and satirical invention, contrived on the principle of the typewriter, as an aid for eating corn on the cob; and in Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, especially where the efficiency of the system for feeding the worker seeks to destroy the last vestige of human will and to convert him into a robot or a cog in the machinery.

That the same sentence as my suspected key phrase includes "Modern Times," the title of a recent Dylan album, draws my attention as well.

I suggest that The Asia Series could be a subversive act created with thoughts of Duchamp. If the intent was to cause controversy then the installation at the Gagosian Gallery is wildly successful. Dylan as Duchamp is not a new idea, Milton Glaser's iconic portrait of Dylan is just that.

There is much, much more going on here. The new Dylan interview has other coded references to explore. The eight foot tall image of a 1966 LIFE magazine cover featuring jet fighters flying over Vietnam with added cryptic text by Dylan that is on the Gagosian website, but is seemingly not part of The Asia Series, also deserves additional scrutiny. 

I do appreciate The New York Times mentioning my 2010 essay for New Haven Review, which regards some of Dylan's methods, in their coverage of The Asia Series. My essay might add some context and background for those seeking something more constructive than the din of plagiarism accusations I see being played out in the media.